Monthly Archives: June 2013

Recently there was an article about on The Mary Sue discussing how Pacific Rim recognizes that the “fanboy” audience isn’t just men anymore. The article is pretty interesting, but the thing that I found most disconcerting was that the movie is not trending well with audience interest. People would rather go see Grown-Ups 2 than Pacific Rim, which baffles my mind. Though I am one of the people who is excited about a robots versus aliens sort of movie. The article also discusses that closer to the movies release they are going to talk more about the relationship of the pilots. After the jump is a recent featurette that does just that, so hopefully one of the videos makes you excited as well. Continue reading →

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I often run into a wall of not having seen the “classic” movies of geekdom. In my mind, geekdom is large, and can contain many things. In high school, my group of friends considered only a couple of things to be our baseline: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the book), and The Princess Bride (the movie). Solid foundations for geekdom.

Oh, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Obviously.

Some of the most fun you can have with fantasy, science fiction, and parody, this is indeed a good start. From there, I have gifted some of my favorites, like Dune, and The Killing of Worlds. We loan people things or watch them together, like Doctor Who and Game of Thrones. We share our passion for geeky things.

And in some circles, I was known as an expert in cult classic movies. And in other circles, I am left decidedly wanting. We finally started working on the list of movies I hadn’t seen (or don’t remember seeing as a child, one of the two) recently, and my friends and family led with a winner. Here we have a list of nine movies I need to see that I haven’t, classics and cult classics and then one movie I just recently saw.

If it wasn’t obvious so far, one of my favorite things is Science Fiction. The worlds we create, that become science fiction, are often so much fun. They are excellent ways to explore the world that we know and live in, as well as to extrapolate the future or what we might do in a wholly new situation.

I have also started looking at how science fiction and religion interact. Often, religion is strangely absent from science fiction – or is looked at as the mythology of the past. In particular, I have been working from a perspective in a particular science fiction novel, A Case of Conscience by James Blish. His thought was that the existence of aliens would be particularly troublesome to meld with faith. See my posts on this and others like it in Science Fiction and Religion: https://comparativegeeks.wordpress.com/category/science-fiction/science-fiction-and-religion/

However, underlying all of this is a singular question: What is science fiction? What does it mean, and what are we doing when we produce it, or enjoy it? I have a favorite definition, so let’s look at that, and at a few examples.

David and I went to see World War Z last night and while I did enjoy the movie the world it paints seems far from the world presented in the book. The book paints these amazingly complex stories into a single story of the Zombie War or World War Z. We get to see the reaction from all the world powers and the history behind those decisions. We get to see the reaction from people on the ground as they realize what is happening. In the book we eventually see as the world figures out how to deal with the problem.

Now it is important to recognize that the movie for World War Z is designed as a trilogy – it does not give us the whole war and we don’t see the very beginning because we are telling the story from the perspective of America and the United Nations. At the same time they are telling a very different story than what is presented in the book. So the best way to talk about this is to go through some of the biggest differences that I found. (Spoilers for World War Z after the break) Continue reading →

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Alright, I want to talk about the recent Star Trek movies, and what I think a good next sort of plot would be. To do so, I think spoilers will be unavoidable, so I just wanted to throw that out there now. If you haven’t seen Star Trek: Into Darkness yet, go forth to the movie theater and do so. Then come back and you can read on.
There have been a couple of different plot sources so far, so while there has been some reaction against their source in the second one, I want to point out that there was something different in the first one. And that means we need to move into spoilerville. Onwards!